Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Teardown: Original Phablet Sets Bar

Memory: Samsung packages twin stacks of LPDDR3 DRAM
From the x-ray image, we can see Samsung's packaging solution for 3 Gbit of LPDDR3. You can see the two stacks of three dice, each wire bonded to the memory substrate. Although there is still plenty of talk about moving to TSV solutions for mobile DRAM, we can see here that wire bonding is still a viable solution.

Display: Better images are "PenTile"-tastic
The reason this phone is special is because of its screen. The original Galaxy Note measured 5.3" diagonally, the Galaxy Note 2 measured 5.5", and the latest iteration stands tall at 5.7" of Super AMOLED beauty.

As seen in our teardown of the Galaxy S4, the Super AMOLED display is no longer an RGB matrix, but rather Samsung's PenTile. Without going into the specifics on the PenTile, the focus of Samsung with this new display technology has been to further develop the rendering of photos, videos, and screen input data while at the same time further reducing power consumption.

Super AMOLED pixel dimensions, front view.

Super AMOLED circuit layout, back view.

Addition information on the Samsung AMOLED display technology can be found at www.techinsights.com or by clicking the links below.

The Bill of Materials Cost: Solid margins for category leader in a growth market
Samsung's Galaxy Note 3 retails for $699, but TechInsights Teardown costing estimates that the production of each device is less than $240.00. Our pricing research shows that the display module and baseband processor making up the largest components of cost. This reflects a healthy margin for the industry's leading phablet device.

This is number translates into the potential for significant revenues for Samsung as the Galaxy Note 2 shipped ~28 million devices and combined with sales of the original Galaxy Note shipments have reached around 38 million. In fact the CEO of Samsung, J.K. Shin has said, "Galaxy Note 1 and Galaxy Note 2 were sold for a total of over 38 million. We believe Galaxy Note 3 will outdo its predecessors."

More to come…
TechInsights will continue its teardown of the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 over the coming days. Please visit our website http://techinsights.com/samsung-galaxy-note-3/for the latest analysis and images of the camera module, display module, S-Pen, and more.

For more information on previous Samsung devices please check out the following:

The tear down effectively reveals the presence of ST's 32bit Microcontroller STM32F401. This IC has been recently announced publicly to the mass market too . It seems here Samsung was able to be an early adopter of this new microcontroller ..

This is a very nice informative teardown of a two quad core professor device, Samsung had really put too many features in a small and lighter device, I was wondering that that Galaxy has 3GB or memory and the article speaks that it has 3Gbit of memory, does it has 8 different slices of 3Gbit or it is something different?